Slashdot Mirror
Deutsche Bahn to Sue Google
Many readers including this Anonymous Coward have written about this case: "After the DB-Deutsche Bahn (German railway comp.) won a case against Dutch ISP xs4all to remove 2 articles that were hosted on one of their servers, the DB now is going to sue Google (Wednesday) and probably in 2 days time Yahoo! and Altavista. Infoworld has an article about it. More background information about previous attempts to censor the same site can be found here and here's list of mirrors." And Yes, "Access is Forbidden."
Here's Google's cache of the broken link.
Google's defense: I know NOTH-ing. I see NOTH-ing. I hear NOTH-ing...
Germans will believe that, right?
"Deutsche Bahn will file suit in Germany, where all three search engine companies have subsidiaries, because it feels it would not stand a chance in a U.S. court because of freedom of speech allowed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."
Have these people not been paying attention lately?
Just to clarify its not just the cache, its actually the links and its not to their site but articles that detail how to cut power on parts of the railway system.
Its not *their* site they want removing.
no sig.
Notice that DB is not suing Google in an American court, citing that they would probably not be successful due to our freedom of speech laws....interesting juxtaposition with our constant bashing of other countries (NZ for ex) in limiting their citizens access/freedom to speech and info.... Here's to Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista -- stick to your guns!!!
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
Too bad its apache, for if it was IIS then I could just hack in...
Save money- vote Republican
...that by attacking sites like this, they are simply drawing MORE attention to what they are trying to shut down?
By now dozens of people have mirrored the site, and the possibility of it going away forever has diminished greatly.
Fools.
no
There is freedom of speech in Germany, as part of the constitution. The main difference is that free speech is considered to be one of many rights, not "the #1 amendment", so it is more often weighted against other rights.
As we all know, once lawyers start to weigh and argue about things, anything can happen and right or wrong isn't really a matter anymore.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
What do you mean by "a company such as Google"? If you mean "a company which is popular with geeks and Slashdotters" - well, you're right, in that some of the shine may gradually rub off their geek-friendly, free-speech protecting image. OTOH, plenty of large well-known corporations do business with China, say, or in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan,.. ( insert your favourite repressive non-democratic regime...) IBM organised the Holocaust, you know, and Cisco built and support the Great Firewall of China (and who knows who supplies the software tools that pull out Falun Gong-related email from the wire and queue a request for the secret police to pay the poster a visit at 4am?) (actually, it's probably Free software: but that's morally defensible, in that the Free software community are not getting rich supporting repression.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
"Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there."
-- Clare Booth Luce, 1903-1987
Second, imagine some radical group in the US. posting instructions on how to hijack some planes and fly them into skyscrapers on the internet. Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out?
There goes your "free speech"...
q.e.d.
Thank you and now mod me down to oblivion for beeing a german nazi or whatever!
Why not read the Grundgesetz, the constitution of Germany? You may be interested in article 5, which guarantees freedom of speech, details what it extends to (e.g. explicitly includes writing and pictures, but also the right to acquire information) and where the limits are (violation of other laws and defamation).
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
First of all, you should read the article, it answers most of your questions.
They already asked google to take it down the hyperlinks and cached copies, but they didn't, so now they're suing
It's a tough situation : a handbook on how to destroy rail tracks is hardly worth fighting for - but even in those instances, freedom of speech must be absolute
but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...
It actually is a much longer story (and more interesting), you can read it HERE
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
A spoon in the hands of the wrong person can be deadly too. We should ban spoons and any information about spoons.
A brick, and any information about making or using bricks, can be dangerous in the wrong hands too; we should ban everything about those as well.
Blocking a page about some idea to sabotage is not going to make such extremists go away or stop their actions.
It's just about control and power; and it's silly.
I won't get started about nuclear power stuff, but u talk about banning instructions of how to commit crimes. Crimes where? believe it or not, different countries have different laws. Alcohol is illegal in some Arab states; does that mean we should prohibit all home-brew websites? Free-speech is virtually a crime in China; so free speech activist sites should be banned. And even so, who is to say which laws are just? The Nazis made laws, ppl who broke them were severely punished; u reckon everyone should have blindly observed those laws just because they were laws?
Sorry, u cannot (logically nor practically) censor the web.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
The regular schedule being "we haven't a clue when we're leaving or arriving either, and yes - you will be delayed along the way". As per every other UK train.
Cheers,
Iam
>
....
Hu?
In wich world do you live?
German Constitution Article 5: Everybody has the right to distribute and express his OPINION freely as well as to inform himself freely. [...]
Note: free speach is expressing your OPINION. And it is getting free access to the OPINIONS of other people.
Free speach is NOT a detailed instruction in "HOW TO KILL PEOPLE", "HOW TO DESTROY OTHER PEOPLES PROPERTY" and "HOW TO RECRUIT TERRORISTS".
If a certain piece of paper with letters on it is free speach or an illegal encaurae of terrorism is a descission of a court.
I doub that you can call a descission of a court censorship.
Better you read the article, and make yourself an opinion, instead of jumping on the train of dumb comments
I fully support banning such stuff from the internet, exactly as I support banning child porn from the internet. But thats only my opinion.
Regards,
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn't happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they've hardly bothered us since then.
-- Tom Lehrer, MLF Lullaby
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Ya, but the cache is still accessible, and the cache might hang around for a while longer than the links, giving the chance for people to mirror things.
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
In other news, www.xs4all.nl will change to www.xs4allexceptcertainanarchistpublications.nl to represent recent events.
Would it not be a better idea for Deutsche Bahn to use their excess cash to:
As the already-present mirrors show, attempting to censor people's right to freedom of speech on the Internet is a futile exercise.
Right, some links on a few search engines are better advertising than numerous news articles describing exactly what the blocked pages contain...
"There is no chance to sue them in the U.S. You are really allowed to put anything on the Internet there,"
Yeah, instructions on hacking railway systems are ok, but you'd better not post instructions describing how to open legally purchased documents "protected" by some form of "encryption."
I decided to post rather than mod...
It's VERY important to remember two things...
Security by obscurity is bad when dealing when computers because computers by their very nature makes it much easier to root out patterns and obscure points of interest.
Security by obscurity in the physical world is a de facto standard and is paramount to many security issues. For example, like it or not, our goverment uses plain-jane trucks to move radioactive elements, high explosives, deadly biological materials, and large volumes of currency throughout our nation.
By not having the routes, the trucking schedules and payload information, a high degree of security is available. This is exactly security through obscurity. Would you want this information to be available? I know I sure wouldn't.
Imagine the cost (because of the physical security requirements) and the greatly increased odds of something bad happening in the event that this information were generally known to the public. I can easily imagine bad things for any number of reasons if this were public information. Since it's not, everything from protects (increasing the odds of accidents) to terrorist attacks are avoided, and this is just the short list.
In short, in the real world, security through obscurity is not only important, it's paramount to our national security...don't believe me, ask NTSA, NSA, CIA and the FBI as well as just about any other law enforcement agency. It's only with computers that this should be avoided; as a rule of thumb...
Let's see if that works.
8 Steps to Terrorism
1. Learn to wiggle a yoke without crash.
2. Let pilot take off.
3. Hijack plane.
4. Follow a hiway to a city.
5. Point at tallest building.
6. Try to keep the plane level.
7.
Hang on, there's someone at the door, I'll post the other 2 in a minute
Free speech is not a blanket clause to let you say whatever you want.
The first amendment is still bound within the confines of the law. For example, it's illegal to threaten the lives of certain government officials. No first amendment argument is gonna help there.
The FBI might go after said site. They might go after sites with similar content, in hopes of getting to a network behind it. But I highly doubt they would go after Google for merely indexing it. That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.
By your logic the Allies in WWII were in the wrong for giving information on sabotage tactics to the French resistance. So much for supporting freedom fighters in tyranical nations.
This is the same basic flaw of logic that burdens the US's war on terror. According to the definition we are using (all non-government supported organized violence) our own founding fathers were terrorists.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
A brick, and any information about making or using bricks, can be dangerous in the wrong hands too; we should ban everything about those as well.
Blocking a page about some idea to sabotage is not going to make such extremists go away or stop their actions.
Bricks are meant to build houses. Yet, you can use bricks to maim people.
On the other hand, guidebooks for destroying railroad tracks server no other purpose than destroying railroad tracks in attempts to disrupt the service, with the unfortunate possibility of killing people.
Your analogy is too simplistic to be considered any valid. Free speech needs not be associated with destruction and killings. For this would definitely put and end to free speech.
As someone who works for a major German telecommunications company, I was directly involved in this, in that my office was responsible for giving the DB a 'heads up' about the site (whether or not we found it I'm not sure).
I was asked to take a look at the portion of the site relating to my companies products (which was a guide on how to sabotage them to disrupt train services), and essentially the most elegant intructions given were "Pry the cover off, bash the insides to pieces with a rock, and/or fill it up with dirt/glue/etc".
This was only a few weeks ago too, and this is the first I've heard of any action the DB has taken, but I am quite impressed at the speed at which this has progressed.
(Details have been left vague to give me some semblance of anonyminity, protect my job, etc)
Antiquis temporibus, nati tibi similes in rupibus ventosissimis exponebantur ad necem.
We don't need Freedom of Speech protections to protect Aunt Helen's "I love puppies!" website. We don't need them to protect Ed Jones's "The Taliban suck" page. The wingnuts are the people testing the bounds of free speech, and they're the ones who let us know how much of it we can count on.
Some argue that people like this are actually a threat to speech, by inciting the government to crack down so regularly. Personally, I take the opinion that your average government would simply attempt to regulate even less controversial speech-- things like "steal music" or "this politician sucks"-- if they didn't have the wingnuts to keep them constantly tied up in court.
PS I realize we're talking about a private company, in a country without all of the free speech protections of the US. Nonetheless, speech protections are important to us all, and should be fought for no matter where they're threatened. Particularly on the net, where one country's silly laws can potentially be applied to everyone on the planet.
Translation from: http://www.lib.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/germ/ggeng.h
Why the freespeech in germany isn't as free as in the USA is because of the second part. Most of the restrictions of the free speech are because the content of the speech is against the constiution.
Jan
Read Article 5 Section 2 here. Rather pulls the "free" out of "free speech" doesn't it?
On the other hand, guidebooks for destroying railroad tracks server no other purpose than destroying railroad tracks in attempts to disrupt the service, with the unfortunate possibility of killing people.
But then again, information in itself has never harmed anyone. What harms is the practical use of that information and that is what is and should be illegal. Not publishing the information.
If we banned all information on how to blow things up and how to murder evil dictators, how many books, movies and documentaries would not need to be banned? I for one think that is too high a price to pay for banning people like these from publishing their ideas on the internet. As far as I know, none of the ideas in their manifesto has been used yet. So, arrest the bad guys if they are really stupid enough to use the material.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
There's no accounting for taste, anyway.
The obvious point is, if it's shown on German TV and Germans apparently like to watch it, it doesn't seem to be too insulting to Germans, now does it? (So much for your attempt at political correctness.)
You want to see something *really* politically incorrect about WWII? Try the British comedy "Allo Allo"...you know, the series with the "Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies by Van Klump", a gay German tank commander, a Prussian general whose idea of politics is to shoot French peasants and so on. (And again, my wife loves it, as do I.)
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
Nice shot at a knee-jerk reaction.
What would I say to such a document? Post it. Link to it. Alert the media. Get CNN to do a cyber-scare article on it. Get people thinking about the state of security in their airports and the danger this represents.
Know why a group of people were able to seize guided missiles for the price of some flying lessons, airline tickets, and box cutters? It wasn't because box cutters are such a formidable weapon. It is because the passangers and crew of those airlines did not expect what was to come. Up to that point, hijackings tended to be isolated events that lead up to a police standoff on the ground. Most of the time, the majority of hijack victoms survived.
The passangers of Flight 93 quickly learned of the fate of other hijacked airlines that day thanks to mobile phones. With the cry of "let's roll" (accredited to Todd Beamer), the passangers of that flight attacked their captors. It cost them their lives as the entire flight went down in a field in western Pennsylvania. But their flight was the only one to not also crash in to a monument and take additional lives on the ground (authorities believe the flight was headed for a target in Washington).
The difference between Flight 93 and other doomed flights that day was a slim margin of knowledge. A realization that the threat was different than the past. Information.
If a group attempted the same tactic today (with box cutters, much less the nail-clippers being confiscated by airport security now), they would meet the same resistance. Additional attempts of airline terrorism (the shoe-bomber being a prime example) has lead to quick action by fellow passangers to subdue their would-be attacker.
What would a document called "10 easy ways to Hijack an airliner and slam it into a building" do? I can tell you what a lack of such a document didn't do - stop the events of 9/11 from happening.
That's like suing the phone company for listing a criminal in the phone book.
True. This wouldn't happen in the USA. It's like suing Napster for providing the infrastructure to share songs... oh wait... damn.
Did the September 11th hijackers visit such a helpful web site to learn how to hijack planes? No? Then what harm can putting the information up have? The bad guys already know. Can putting the information up potentially help? Certainly. I wish more bad guys would put their evil plans up on the web. Then the FBI could read the documents, identify the security weaknesses the bad guys are planning on using and fix the security weaknesses.
Criminals are perfectly capable and willing to spread censored information amoung themselves. After all, if you've decided to sacrifice your life to kill innocents, what's going to stop you from making some photocopies?
Phones have lots of uses. So does Google. Although I imagine xs4all has more uses than just posting anarchist links, and they lost, so what do I know.
Those who fail to understand communication protocols, are doomed to repeat them over port 80.
Then you go on to blatantly pervert the concept of free speech. Free Speech does need to be associated with destruction and killing. Free Speech is absolute, it's the implementations that require (out of practicality) some restrictions.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
This is more of a general rant than about the specifics of this case, but since the discussion has veered into general free speech issues, I think it's appropriate.
Thanks to the DMCA and similar restrictions, publishing information on cracking dongles (hardware keys for software) is basically illegal. Concrete details on how to crack a dongle definately is. The people putting up information on cracking dongles usually do so for the sole purpose of encouraging others to use illegal copies of software. Clearly the dominant use of this information is criminal.
So what's the harm in censoring this speech?
Well, several years ago I was asked to investigate adding copy protection to a new software product (now defunct). My initial research focused on "respectable" publications on the subject. I found almost nothing useful. If the information I found was to be believed, dongles were practically impossible to defeat. So I extended my search to cracker sites. Now I found something. I discovered that all dongle technologies have been defeated on a case by case basis. I discovered which dongle technologies were trivial to defeat and which were very hard to defeat. I learned specific, concrete weaknesses and arguments for and against dongles. With this information I was able to provide solid information for my employers to use to make a decision.
Let's say that the information on dongle cracking had been removed from the web. Well, my research would have been mostly fruitless. I would have had to largely rely on the misleading claims of the manufacturers themselves and reviews that didn't make serious attempts to defeat the dongles. However, the crackers would still have access to the information, passed around via instant messaging, password protected ftp, email, and other techniques. Dongles would still be insecure, but I wouldn't be able to make reasoned decisions about them.
Please, don't forget that those examples are not limitations of speech. They are limitations of acts that may be commited through the mechanism of speech. It would be perfectly legal to yell "Fire" in an ampitheatre being used for a lecture at a firefighters convention. I see naked children on TV regularly, but they're not being sexually exploited - they're in diaper commercials. Libel and slander are just that - libel and slander, not any particular speech.
We make laws against inciting riots, exploitation of children, and spreading malicious untruths about people. We do not directly limit speech. This is an important disinction that too few people recognize.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
> but there have always been some things you couldn't do. Yelling fire in a crowded theater is the classic example.
n dness.com/FREEDOM990628.htm
That is a fallacious argument. You might want to read this to see why.
http://216.239.39.100/search?q=cache:www.fatalbli
a handbook on how to destroy rail tracks is hardly worth fighting for - but even in those instances, freedom of speech must be absolute
but it sucks having to do it over some dangerous wingnuts' propaganda...
As I understand it the the censored article was a descrition of a rather sophisticated form of sabotage. They trigger the railway system's built in fail-safe mechanisms and the trains slow to a few MPH. Minimal damage that actually results in safer than normal operation.
You can disagree with their position. You can arrest them when they sabotage equipment. But you have to respect their commitment to safety.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
when I read of other 'progressive' governments (read: Great Britain, Germany, Canada. Not Pakistan, Peru, etc.) doing away with the rights that I take for granted (and enjoy reading about and taking part in the free exercise thereof) I am quite startled
So, what rights do you have in the US that I don't have in the UK? At least I can discuss ROT-13 in a public place without getting sent to jail.